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Granderson: “Hoops will live on”

With the labor negotiations not showing signs of being resolved soon, the entire 2011-2012 NBA season is in jeopardy of being called of. However, LZ Granderson of ESPN, thinks that hoops will live even if the NBA season doesn’t.

He wrote this nice piece that is a MUST read for all basketball fans.

There could be a lost season with no NBA championship banner, but the game would live on.

“At this very moment there is quarter-size bump on the right side of my forehead, courtesy of an errant elbow during a lunchtime pickup game of basketball.

I wanted the rebound and obviously I wasn’t the only one.

I didn’t call foul because, well, I was too busy rolling around on the ground. Besides, when I finally got up, I was told I was hit by my own teammate.

All I could do was laugh, thinking: “I am living.”

This is why I feel a bit ambivalent when I hear the NBA season may not start on time. I love the league but I won’t be devastated if the entire season is lost. It’s a business. A business that only represents part of the story of basketball. The lump on my head epitomizes the rest.

When you grow up shoveling snow off of the courts so you can get a run or two in during winter break like my boys and I did in Detroit, then you know ball can’t be contained by 30 teams, 82 games or a salary cap. If the players and owners can’t find a way to bridge their $800 million gap — fine. But they can’t take the ball and go home. The ball stays right here, with me, in my heart. The love for ball will be here when negotiators leave the table, and it’ll be there when they come back.

I don’t mean to downplay the effects of a lost season.

For any major league, the cancellation of a season warps history, changing things such as a player’s ability to climb the ranks in career statistics like points scored or games played. It also hits the industry that is built around the training camps, preseason games and memorabilia. It cuts into the bottom line of restaurants, bars and businesses near arenas. It hits broadcasters like ESPN and TNT who have invested millions in talent, studio sets and rights. Fans who play the fantasy edition of the game will have to find a new hobby. And yes men will have to make decisions on their own … for a short while anyway.

A cancelled NBA season may turn people off from professional basketball. The 1998-99 lockout resulted in a shortened season and subsequent drops in TV ratings and ticket sales. But I will dare say, it did not touch the love people had for the game itself.

Not when men in their 40s and 50s are getting out of bed at 5:30 a.m. to get a couple of hours of run in before work because it is the only time their schedule will allow. Not when virtually the entire population of small towns all over the country cram into a gymnasium for a high school game, or when every eye in a big-city barbershop is fixated on a re-broadcasted game most of the customers have already seen 100 times. Think of it this way: You don’t stop listening to music because R.E.M. broke up. Instead you just play “Automatic for the People” and keep it moving. Similarly, classic games will be treated like those classic CDs — even if the source that created those classics is no longer playing arenas night after night.

I can close my eyes and see Maryland’s Kristi Toliver crossing over Duke’s Alison Bales before hitting the step-back 3 that forced overtime in the 2006 NCAA championship game, a game Maryland eventually won. I can still hear the inquisitive whispers in the crowd during a summer tournament game in Indianapolis that featured Kevin Durant before his senior year of high school.

I can still feel the passing air coming from my 14-year-old son’s hand as he got this close to actually blocking my shot. We both paused for a moment, realizing that neither one of us was jumping the way we used to.

Those memories are not special because of the NBA.

They are special because unlike football, or baseball or hockey, basketball is the one team sport that doesn’t require a specific place to play or a lot of people to enjoy. Some of the best times of my life came from shooting Nerf hoops with my buddies in the dorm my freshman year in college. When you’ve experienced that kind of communal laughter and joy from a round sponge and a piece of plastic stuck on the wall, you’ve experienced the game of basketball in a way squabbling millionaires and billionaires can hardly touch.

Do I hope to see players like Dirk and D12 back on the court?

Absolutely.

But the WNBA is in the middle of its playoffs, Euroleague Basketball starts next month and I can watch the prime-time games of the inaugural Battle 4 Atlantis in November and March Madness and the alternative CBI tournament in March. Plus I can watch as many YouTube clips of Durant or John Wall going off during summer rec league games as I want or I can go down to a local gym and get hit in the head with an elbow.

The point is we may not, I may not, have the NBA right now.

We may not have it next week.

But when you love the game, there’s always ball. We don’t need a collective bargaining agreement for that.”

3 thoughts on “Granderson: “Hoops will live on””

A story of a man that is going insane, a basketball point of view. OUCH, game or not I can find something to keep me busy. I will miss not watching a SPURS game when I go home on vacation, if that really happens. I hope it doesn’t happen cause it won’t benefit anyone. However; I know that San Antonio is the most creative city in the country or overseas that they just won’t let this time go to waste, they’ll figure something out to keep SAS fans interested in that the rest of the NBA will follow. But thats just me hoping. Good Nite guys.

The game will live on, but we will definitely miss a lot of basketball action from our favorite teams especially the Spurs. From Tim Duncan’s bank shots, to Ginobili’s daredevil drives to Parker’s teardrops all of those will surely be missed.